As a freshman, Jasmine May didn’t know that she would
major in medicinal chemistry. Or that she’d eventually win
the prestigious Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, or that in her
first year at UB, she would get to work with award-winning
scientists and use cutting-edge technology. All she knew was that
her father was dying.

“I felt that my dad would have wanted me to stay focused
on
school and do my best.”

— Jasmine May

Douglas May died of brain cancer in September 2008, just weeks
into Jasmine’s first semester at UB. A talented mechanical
engineer, he graduated first in his college class. He and his
wife, Verneice, a poet, actor and mechanical draftsman, raised
their only daughter on a 100-acre farm in Sanborn, N.Y., passing on
their love of nature and knowledge.

Douglas was both serious and fun-loving; he drove a metallic
brown Corvette, hounded Jasmine about her homework and shared her
sense of humor and self-confidence that have carried her through
the ups and downs of her undergraduate years.

“It was extremely painful,” Jasmine says, recalling
his two years of surgery and radiation, and how he gradually lost
the ability to beat her at chess, their favorite game.
“Especially because it was brain cancer, and I feel like that
was one of his most treasured aspects of himself—his
intelligence and his thought process.”

Rather than drop out or lighten her load, Jasmine threw herself
into life at UB. She joined the UB
Dazzlers dance troupe and made some great friends around
campus.

She also loaded up on freshman classes like evolutionary
biology, chemistry, statistics and a Shakespeare honors
seminar, and joined The
University Honors College—one of the nation’s first
honors programs for talented young scholars. It helped shrink
UB’s large campus and gave Jasmine a chance to grow
intellectually, she says.

She chose her major after learning that medicinal chemists
were the ones developing cancer drugs. Now a senior, she
continues to “compete” with her father
by capitalizing on UB’s many opportunities for
research and learning.

“I felt that my dad would have wanted me to stay
focused on school and do my best,” she says
modestly.

Featured Video

Jasmine May: In Her Own Words

A student researcher on the hunt for tumors deep within the
brain, Jasmine talks about her work, her favorite freshman mentor,
and why joining the University Honors College was one of the best
choices she made at UB.

Learning to experiment

In the summer after her freshman year, Jasmine participated in
the Collegiate Science
and Technology Entry Program (CSTEP), a statewide program that
helps talented underrepresented students follow careers in
scientific, technical and health-related professions. She worked
with Richard Rabin, a UB professor of pharmacology and toxicology,
to explore the effects of the pesticide chlorpyrifos and ethanol on
healthy brain cells in individuals who consume alcohol.

That fall, Jasmine began working with UB’s Kenneth
Takeuchi, a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor, after taking his
chemistry classes.

A student favorite who was named New
York Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching, Takeuchi helped Jasmine hone her basic
research skills. She quickly learned what she liked about bench
science (the lab environment, the undergraduate and graduate
students on her team). “I also learned that you need to be
organized if you want to carry out good work. You need to encourage
cooperation within the lab,” she says.

Working with mentors
like Takeuchi was pivotal for Jasmine. He was the first of several
accomplished UB faculty willing to open their labs and minds to the
budding scientist, even if it was to talk about
non-research-related topics. She still checks in with him on
occasion. “I really appreciate and treasure his
opinion.”

“Jasmine is special because she makes special
choices,” Takeuchi says, adding that he was impressed by her
dedication to her academics. Among her motivations, he says, is
“the altruistic goal of helping solve currently intractable
problems in science, which may ultimately result in improving the
health and quality of life for others.”

Erogbogbo immediately noticed Jasmine’s energy and
encouraged her interest in cancer research. “She is an
exceptional UB student because she is highly motivated to challenge
herself by going above and beyond the call of duty in her
classwork, laboratory duties and extracurricular activities,”
he says.

Jasmine uses luminescent silicon nanoparticles like these to
develop diagnostic and treatment devices for cancer. Their colors
depend on the size of the nanoparticle.

“I like seeing my name among the other student winners
from Harvard and Yale. It tells me I can compete with them and
still win.”

—Jasmine May

In Swihart’s lab, Jasmine worked with silicon
quantum dots—a type of nanotechnology that can be used to
study cancerous tumors—and learned about etching procedures
used to make the quantum dots luminescent. She was drawn to nanomedicine
because of its potential to target brain cancer at sub-microscopic
levels. “Since the ‘blood-brain barrier’ is one
of the biggest difficulties when dealing with the brain, the best
method is to work on the smallest scale possible,” she
says.

Jasmine continues to work with quantum dots using new techniques
in a UB lab overseen by SUNY Distinguished Professor Paras
Prasad, executive director of the ILPB and a leading scientist
in nanomedicine. With her labmates—some fellow
undergraduates, others graduate researchers and
postdocs—Jasmine creates images of tumors that can be used to
better identify and treat them at various stages of the
disease.

Sampling the college smorgasbord

Jasmine’s determination has paid off. As a sophomore, she
was chosen to present a research poster on her nanotechnology
techniques at a SUNY undergraduate research conference in Albany,
and at the Annual
Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students in
Charlotte, N.C. As part of an undergraduate seminar called Community
Linked Interdisciplinary Research, taught by award-winning UB
chemistry professor Joseph Gardella, she visited Buffalo high
schools to help teach students how to design science
experiments.

In 2010, Jasmine won the prestigious Goldwater
Scholarship and Excellence in Education award, a federally
funded competitive scholarship for students studying science, math
and engineering. She did a silent dance of joy in a hushed library
when she found out, thrilled to have been chosen from more than
1,100 of the country’s top mathematics, science and
engineering students for the honor.

“I like seeing my name among the other student winners
from Harvard and Yale,” she said at the time. “It tells
me I can compete with them and still win.”

Jasmine hopes that her academic achievements at UB will help her
reach her goal to become an oncologist or radiologist at a top
research university affiliated with a cancer research institute, an
ambition that fits well with UB because of the university’s
close association with Roswell Park Cancer
Institute, the country’s first cancer center.

She wants to combine bench science and drug development with
clinical practice and patient care. “I want to be the kind of
oncologist who takes people’s personal experiences back to
the lab,” she says.

For undergraduates
interested in research, but unsure of where to begin, Jasmine
advises: Sample everything. Try things you’re not
familiar with. “Even if it’s outside your major, or
doesn’t seem possible or obvious, don’t be afraid to
walk up to people and ask.

“I feel it is very important that undergraduates have
these chances, because they can affect the choices that students
make with their career,” she continues. “It seems that
many students focus too much on the coursework and don’t
really think about application of their knowledge. By being
introduced into the research world early, students can make better
career decisions.”

Life has changed drastically for Jasmine in only three years,
but her goals have not. She still lives with her mother in Sanborn
and commutes to UB. But now she is armed with an education that
could one day help beat brain cancer.

Preparing top students

The University Honors
College prepares promising young scholars to succeed in the
international marketplace and to make a difference in their own
communities. It's the small-college experience, within a
large research university.

Roswell Park Cancer Institute

UB is proud to be a close partner of the Roswell Park Cancer
Institute, the world’s oldest comprehensive cancer center
and the first of its kind in the U.S. Many of Roswell’s
clinical, translational and basic science researchers are also UB
faculty who teach the next generation of scientists and health-care
practitioners at Roswell Park’s
Graduate Division.

UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences

The Center of
Excellence, located in downtown Buffalo on the Buffalo Niagara
Medical Campus serves as a hub for collaboration between UB,
Roswell Park and the Hauptman–Woodward Medical
Research Institute. Several UB schools conduct cancer-related
research at these facilities in fields including
biostatistics, gene therapy, immunology, tobacco prevention and
other clinical and translational areas of medicine and biomedical
sciences.

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